So Your Child Has Been Possessed: The VRV Guide to Possessed Children in Film

Kids are the worst: they’re shrill, dangerously uncoordinated, easily bored, and don’t always poop in the toilet. So who has the patience to deal with one that’s been possessed? Certainly not you, that’s for sure. Thankfully we at VRV are the leading experts in the field of possessed children, and are here to guide you through — or even help you avoid — the often trying predicament that is your already horrible kid being possessed.

Okay, so legal has just informed me that I’m required to share the following:

VRV, VRVBLOG, and its parent company Ellation Inc holds no expertise or authority, nor provides any services in the fields of possession, children, or possessed children. We do, however, have several programs featuring possessed children available for you to stream with your Premium subscription.

Apparently I’m also legally bound to apologize to you for any “distress or confusion” you may have experienced due to my claims, and for “any actions you may have taken” as a result of such claims. And that my job as a freelance contributor is limited to providing you with a background on the sub-genre before showcasing a selection of films available with your VRV Premium subscription (nice way to work in a plug, legal department person).

So let’s take a pea soup-fueled trip back to the early 1970s: in 1971, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is number one on The New York Times Best Seller list, and in 1973 the film adaptation would become the second highest grossing movie of the year. Obviously, this resulted in everyone wanting some of that masturbating-with-a-crucifix money. There was Abbey aka Abbey The Black Exorcist aka the one that got sued for being The Black Exorcist. There was even The Exorcist II: The Heretic, which funnily enough wasn’t as good as Abbey The Black Exorcist. Soon being possessed wasn’t limited to people, either; we had cars (Christine), pianos (The Demons of Ludlow), and beds (Death Bed: The Bed that Eats).

Yet it always seemed to go back to the children. Was it simply a crass attempt at recreating the success of The Exorcist’s 12 year-old possessee Regan? Or does it speak to some instinctual need we have to protect our young? Or is it just that deep down we all think that children deserve to be tied to the bed posts and pelted with holy water?

Now, despite popular belief, children and teens are not just susceptible to Old Scratch and his minions. As the following films demonstrate, they can be possessed by anything ranging from your dead aunt, to an evil Egyptian spirit. But no matter what may have taken hold of your child, we at VRV guarantee these films will guide you through your possession woes, every step of the way (Legal Dept. Note: no).

A message to all you archeologist parents out there: don’t go cracking open cursed tombs in the Egyptian desert. To most of us, this would seem to be common sense, but not for Susie’s dad. He has no sense at all, as demonstrated in the opening when he’s bottling up a scorpion for Susie while his friend reminds him “don’t forget to tell her it’s a symbol of death.” So obviously that guy goes rooting around a cursed tomb, where his partner is impaled on spikes, and he’s blinded by laser beams.

Then like clockwork, an old blind woman gives Susie an amulet and she’s possessed by an ancient Egyptian spirit. Now dad’s able to get an optometrist to prescribe him some eyedrops to counter the effects of those laser beams, but Susie’s possession is a whole other story. Yep, thanks to dad not digging up boring old non-cursed tombs, taxidermy is coming to life and mom is being accosted on the street by strange antique dealers. All the while that amulet is using Susie, and also killing her, and causing a cobra to show up on her stomach X-ray. I think. Director Lucio Fulci even shows up onscreen to state “It’s inexplicable,” confirming that he’s aware it’s all nonsense, probably while knowing that we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Back in 1947, little Laura Gimble was told “Your mother’s a bitch,” and then she met her fiery demise in a ditch off the side of the road. Clearly not someone whose spirit you’d want possessing your young child. Which is exactly what happens thirty years later when Laura’s brother George decides to move into the old family home with wife Vivian (who likes to remind you about her nervous breakdown), and daughter Cathy (who is haunted by visions of a bed unmaking itself).

They hardly even have a chance to unpack before Cathy is poking around the creepy attic, where she finds an even creepier doll, and an even creepier than that portrait of her late Aunt Laura. And wouldn’t you know it, this is one of those creepy portraits where when you stare into its glowing eyes you wind up possessed. Soon Cathy has the neighborhood kids chanting “all women are bitches,” makes a drunken handyman fat-shame the local psychic medium, and uses telekinesis to send her nanny out the window.

If you fed an unrepentantly misogynistic AI every dime store paperback knock-off of The Exorcist, kicked it down a flight of stairs, and then programmed it to write a movie, that movie would be Cathy’s Curse. If you watch only one movie on VRV, that movie should be Cathy’s Curse.

Wes Black is a TV and comic book writer who resides in Los Angeles. He lives in a cave made of musty old paperbacks, and spent an alarming amount of his childhood scouring Chinese grocery stores for movies featuring devil fetuses, human pork buns, and men trapped in black magic sex-pacts with dehydrated ghosts. You can follow him on Twitter: @cenajorts